Now that I’ve moved most of my music onto my music box, I’ve been looking at the possibility of building my own surround decoder, a fantasy which has quickly led me into a void of tools: there is very little in the way of PC hardware and open source software to help. The lack of open source software I can understand, as Dolby is obviously a proprietary format. But the dearth of hardware is more surprising — so far I haven’t been able to find a single pro or semi-pro hardware decoder card that does Dolby Digital. Creative Labs have a few Dolby-compatible cards/drivers, but they’re really designed for gaming (tiny plugs! tiny plugs!), and besides I would prefer to have the decoding and DAC functions on separate cards so I can mix and match performance and capabilities.

So for the moment I’m stuck. I haven’t really had time to play with building a software-only solution using say gstreamer, and anyway suspect that even if it worked, I would rapidly run into latency issues. Any ideas on hardware?

I’ve been obsessing, quietly, about what retro tech says to me. In my current mood, what I think it tells me, is something to which I’ve alluded previously — that once you (we) heft a particular tool and make it a part of your (our) extended being, a world of possibilities closes down around the other potentialities. It’s interesting looking back to the tech that failed, to see some other possibilities, many of which have never been explored subsequently. Or at least an excuse for geek nostalgia.

Any such exploration is half taxonomy (or tech tree, as its known in the god-gaming world), half virtual history (as its known to social theorists and historians with too much time on their hands) [1]. Endless avenues, although the one most directly relevant to Cluster is the virtual present where we ended up with Xanadu rather than the Web. I’m increasingly frustrated with HTML and its inheritors: great chunks of text which require serious time, effort and back-end coding to annotate, thread or version. Sigh. Yes, these are early days, but so was 1970-whenever when Ted Nelson was drawing his beautiful sketches of living documents. And those a damn sight better than this. Waiting for the Great Loop Forward…

Compressed digital formats (mp3 and its ilk) are expedient: they save storage space and download time.

But there’s something rather disingenuous about MusicMatch — the software accompanying iPod on the Windows platform — misrepresenting 128kbps mp3 as ‘cd quality’!

There is a certain aesthetic to degraded digital audio — classic 12-bit samplers sell at inflated prices on eBay for their ‘authentic hip hop sound’ — but the post-Napster generation is being sold a lie by the music industry about the quality of the music they’re being offered by the ‘legal online music revolution’. It’s certainly quicker to download a compressed music track from the iTunes Music Store than a 16-bit uncompressed soundfile, but shouldn’t consumers be given the choice?

The hidden agenda for the music companies seems to be that uncompressed audio can still be sold as a premium product, and the more the punters accept degraded audio as normal, the higher the margin can be on that premium. Witness the delays on release of SACD and DVD-A decks with digital out: the industry is very paranoid about giving (paying) consumers access to ‘master-quality’ content (and fair-usage rights to copy those tracks to any other format they want). But they’re happy enough to sell distorted mp3s to the kids at a buck each. Depressing.

I’ve been working for a while to turn some of the things I talk about here into a more coherent document — part monograph, part marketing tool for what ku24 does.

From the introduction:

Digitally-mediated communications are now essential to creative businesses. However, the wholesale adoption of desktop-centric personal computing has created new challenges for organizations whose success depends, fundamentally, on social interaction and creative collaboration?too often, the digital tools brought in to assist workflow and communications have instead obstructed genuine collaboration.

This whitepaper suggests a radical framework for change, exploiting recent development in social network analysis and emerging communications technologies to restore the primacy of interpersonal communications to the creative workplace.

You can find a draft in PDF format here on the ku24 site.

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